Even with the ever-increasing number of online platforms to use for marketing campaigns, our experience is that email campaigns still provide a significant ROI for many of our clients.

Of course, the ultimate goal of an email campaign is to increase conversions, and that all starts with the open rate. There are a number of reasons that open rates can be low, but we’d guess that a significant percentage of unopened emails were not consciously ignored. Rather, they were received or seen at the wrong time of day, in the wrong place, or on the wrong device (and so on).

Here’s a (really) simple method to increase your open rates:

1) Compose your email and send it out to all of your users.

2) Wait 5 to 7 days and send out the same email with a new subject line only to your subscribers who did not open the initial email (easily segmented with any newsletter delivery system)

When sending or scheduling your second email, experiment with using a different time of day or day of the week (e.g. if initial email was sent during lunchtime on a weekday, try sending the second in the evening, if sent on a weekday, try sending on a weekend, and so on). This increases the chances that you’ll be getting your email in front of people who didn’t see or open the first one due to their schedule and circumstances.

As simple as this sounds, the potential increase in subscribers is well worth the extra couple of minutes it takes to segment, compose a new subject line, and send.